Category Archive: Technology

Back in August, the first copies of Mark Vellend’s book The Theory of Ecological Communities were released. I got one of them and found out from the publisher and from the Twitter-sphere that the books were in high demand. A couple people on Twitter suggested forming a book club, and being a compulsive organizer, I …

I was sitting in the audience during the discussion of the Hacking Ecology 2.0 Ignite session at ESA this year and Josie Simonis, who was on the panel, said something that really resonated with the grad students in the audience and on Twitter. They said that graduate students face a real paradox: grad students need to …

[1] Heh, heh. I’ve always wanted to write a clickbait title. That was fun. Excel. Love it. Hate it. Most ecologists I know use it at least a little, including me. Now I know there are plenty of people who abhor the idea of using Excel for science. But Excel is a tool, just like any …

In computer science, laziness is a virtue. The term “lazy” is basically used as a shorthand for saying you should strive for efficiency so you don’t spend time writing code you could have avoided writing if you’d been smarter about your coding design. I’ve always generally keep an eye towards efficiency in my work, and …

Back in February, I implored you to stop using unlinked footnotes in your blog posts. The intrepid Stephen Heard [1] of Scientist Sees Squirrel fame, not the 18th century governor of Georgia pointed out that that linking is a little kludgy. The return anchor can only be at the beginning of a paragraph, so it’s …

Please, please, for the love of the 21st century, stop putting unlinked footnotes in your blog posts. I know, I know, “everyone” does it. But you guys, it’s really rude. What’s an unlinked footnote? It’s when you write something, and then wanting to comment on what you just wrote (or give references or whatever), you …